Anyone want to read and discuss "The Origin of Consc in the Breakdown of the B Mind ?

[Whateverist]

Was just reading about this on wiki.  Rev Rye mentioned having read it as one of the books on Bowie's list of top 100 and thought I'd like to read it too.  Not sure we've ever done this before but I'm thinking it might be fun to discuss it as we go, like in a book club.  If anyone is interested we can allow a little time for people to get hold of a copy and then maybe we could plan on discussing a chapter a week - or whatever we all agree to.  My preference would probably be to read the newer edition.

In the discussion on wiki I enjoyed the different responses of Dawkins and Dennett to the book.  Intriguing.

Jaynes's hypothesis remains controversial. The primary scientific criticism has been that the conclusions Jaynes drew had no basis in neuropsychiatric fact.[8]
Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) wrote of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."[9]

vs

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested that Jaynes may have been wrong about some of his supporting arguments, especially the importance he attached to hallucinations, but that these things are not essential to his main thesis:[22]

"If we are going to use this top-down approach, we are going to have to be bold. We are going to have to be speculative, but there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science. […] Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun." --Daniel Dennett[23]

The book is called [/url]The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Aug 15, 2000
by Julian Jaynes


But I see there is a newer version with a co-author called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
[url=https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/1501277227/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473988399&sr=1-2&keywords=the+origin+of+consciousness+in+the+breakdown+of+the+bicameral+mind]Jul 7, 2015
by Julian Jaynes and James Patrick Cronin



Think about it and let me know.

[Rev. Rye]

It's been a while since I read Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Honestly, while I can't rightly say I've ever been an honest-to-Jah convert, I've never been wholly able to dismiss it.

Knowing Jaynes' background, how he came up with these ideas so far outside of the mainstream (especially for psychology in 1976), you can never be entirely sure if he's like Erich Hoffer, who wrote a massively influential book on the psychology of crowds in between shifts hauling shit off the San Francisco docks, or like Ayn Rand who basically wrote crib notes on Aristotle marrying it with the most unfettered laissez-faire capitalism and her own random-ass prejudices (including hatred of goddam Beethoven).

Still, subsequent research into some psychotic hallucinations, particularly "command hallucinations" really does jibe with his predictions. Then again, some of the history he puts in to support his theory can be dodgy.

Fact is, it's really too intriguing to ignore, too strange to really be accepted, but there's a good reason it's been in print for 40 years, and it's not because tycoons are paying the Julian Jaynes Society millions to ensure that people will defend their right to do whatever the hell they want unmolested, like some unorthodox philosophers we could mention.

[Gemini]

I've never read it before but I've heard of Jayne's theory. I would say it's plausible-to-certain that some significant psychological evolution (apart from genetic changes) has taken place over the course of human history. IQs have been rising dramatically recently, not due to better nutrition (and certainly not genetic changes) but due to the acquisition of conceptual tools like hypothetical thinking. And I think he's definitely right about the non-unitary view of self.

This sounds interesting. I'll try to get hold of a copy.

[Mister Agenda]

I do not promise to read it, but I'm interested and promise to think about reading it. I get easily distracted in my old age and don't plow through four or five books a week like I used to.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I read this book nearly 30 years ago and at the time did not find it compelling. I felt he relied on too few data points to justify his sweeping generalizations. Only scraps of written narratives from the ancient world have survived. As I recall he based much of his theory on the style of the Homeric epics. Imagine what a future society would think of our mental states if the only surviving text was A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I question the idea that IQ's are rising. Why do we, and I include myself as well, tend to assume that our societal structures, our ways of thinking, and preferred ways of making sense of life are the pinnacle of human consciousness? That seems rather chauvinistic like the Victorian Imperialists feeling superior to those beastly Savages. I do not doubt that we probably live in the most technologically advanced culture yet. There is no evidence to say otherwise. At the same time, 200,000 years is quite a long time, and just a few catastrophic events can wipe out significant progress. Consider for how much intellectual history must have disappeared with a single fire at the Alexandrian Library! Now factor in the Ice Age and all the once habitual land masses in the South Pacific. Our presumably 6,000 year rise to power could have been one of several such eras of advanced civilization. Personally I find it incredible that homo sapiens, people just like you and me, did nothing to better themselves for 194,000 years then inexplicably exploded into action. Recent discovery of the 10,000 year old ruins at Gobekli Tepe call into question the previous timeline.

Based on the above, I do not take much stock in highly speculative pronouncements about human consciousness when we know so very little about the overwhelming majority of our history.

[Crossless2.0]

I think there is also a case to be made that the technological progress "we" have achieved has rendered many of us (myself included) useful idiots in certain respects. Most of us -- the overwhelming majority, I dare say -- are really nothing more than consumers and beneficiaries of this technology and the science that made it possible, without having much skin in the game ourselves.

After all, how many of us in some time traveling scenario in which we are tasked with explaining our modern world to a group of intelligent, curious, sophisticated people living in antiquity would get far in explaining much of anything before our "explanations" began to sound like 'magic' to our listeners? I'm reasonably certain that Aristotle, for example, would have been able to grasp most of the advances made in math and science, and hence also in technology, with the right tutors. So if he is in the audience and concludes his time-traveling interlocutor is resorting to magical explanations for fantastic claims, where does the blame fall? Who, really, is the less intelligent and more ignorant party in that exchange?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Some technologies are pretty basic though. Imagine if the ancient Greeks had movable type. What if the Qin dynasty had double-entry bookkeeping! What if Roman military engineers understood interchangeable part and assembly line production! What if the ancient Persians learned calculus?

(Wouldn't those be some great alternative history novels!)

[Whateverist]

I read this book nearly 30 years ago and at the time did not find it compelling. I felt he relied on too few data points to justify his sweeping generalizations. Only scraps of written narratives from the ancient world have survived. As I recall he based much of his theory on the style of the Homeric epics. Imagine what a future society would think of our mental states if the only surviving text was A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I question the idea that IQ's are rising. Why do we, and I include myself as well, tend to assume that our societal structures, our ways of thinking, and preferred ways of making sense of life are the pinnacle of human consciousness? That seems rather chauvinistic like the Victorian Imperialists feeling superior to those beastly Savages. I do not doubt that we probably live in the most technologically advanced culture yet. There is no evidence to say otherwise. At the same time, 200,000 years is quite a long time, and just a few catastrophic events can wipe out significant progress. Consider for how much intellectual history must have disappeared with a single fire at the Alexandrian Library! Now factor in the Ice Age and all the once habitual land masses in the South Pacific. Our presumably 6,000 year rise to power could have been one of several such eras of advanced civilization. Personally I find it incredible that homo sapiens, people just like you and me, did nothing to better themselves for 194,000 years then inexplicably exploded into action. Recent discovery of the 10,000 year old ruins at Gobekli Tepe call into question the previous timeline.

Based on the above, I do not take much stock in highly speculative pronouncements about human consciousness when we know so very little about the overwhelming majority of our history.

Sounds as though you, like Dawkins, are aghast at how speculative must be any attempts to theorize about the origins of consciousness.  - Can't help feeling some satisfaction in shipping you with Dawkins here.  

Like Dennett, with whom I more often disagree than agree, I think you who "have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun."  - Believe me I am just as dismayed to be shipped with Dennett as you must be to be agreeing with Dawkins.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Sounds as though you, like Dawkins, are aghast at how speculative must be any attempts to theorize about the origins of consciousness.  - Can't help feeling some satisfaction in shipping you with Dawkins here.  

Well, I'm not of the opinion that an interior mental life appeared either suddenly or gradually; but rather that life grew into the awareness of it.

[Angrboda]

Sounds as though you, like Dawkins, are aghast at how speculative must be any attempts to theorize about the origins of consciousness.  - Can't help feeling some satisfaction in shipping you with Dawkins here.  

Well, I'm not of the opinion that an interior mental life appeared either suddenly or gradually; but rather that life grew into the awareness of it.

Of late I'm of the opinion that a reasonably complete interior mental life arose very early in the evolution of animals. While I'm not opposed to engaging in wild speculation, there seems to be a regrettable undercurrent of Lamarckianism to Jaynes thesis, that selective pressures 'force' an evolutionary step, and that those selective pressures come in the form of mental behaviors. It seems there's an, "if you stress it, it will breakdown" current to Jayne's hypothesis. I don't think evolution works that way. The other problem I have with Jayne is the timescale. It seems that according to his description, the change took place in the population over the course of hundreds of years. I would think that if his theory were true, there would still be populations of people behaving in the pre-breakdown way. Granted I don't know how one would tell the difference, but his thesis doesn't seem to incorporate a sufficiently large element of time to be realistic.